"Cooperation or Competition? U.S. Labor Unions, the ICFTU, and the Question of Import Protection, 1953-1969"

This paper contends that US industrial labor unions’ involvement in international trade union confederations was a critical component of their favorable attitude toward trade liberalization in the early Cold War. Disillusioned with economic nationalism in the wake of Depression and War, these leaders sought freer trade flows. Yet they insisted that international trade union organizing and the promotion of fair labor standards must accompany trade liberalization to reduce job losses caused by labor cost differentials. They therefore collaborated with trade unionists from both the developed and the developing world in international labor federations to negotiate the oft-competing interests of importing and exporting countries. Through these organizations, international unionists advocated for trade union protections, international commodity agreements, and government spending to retrain workers left unemployed by import competition. Yet cooperation faltered within international labor federations by the 1960s as divisions between industrializing and deindustrializing economies deepened and as efforts to procure trade adjustment assistance proved inadequate. The breakdown of cooperation within international labor federations on economic matters thus facilitated intensified economic nationalism among US unions by the end of the decade.